Wall Street is abuzz about ‘tokenized assets’—but most activity is limited to a nascent ‘wrapper’ phase, report finds

Finance leaders from BlackRock’s Larry Fink to Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev have displayed enthusiasm for tokenization, a term for representing real-world assets as tokens on the blockchain. But despite the excitement, roughly 78% of tokenized assets remain only as “wrappers,” or receipts for assets that primarily operate off-chain, according to a new report from crypto asset manager Pantera. 

The report scored 542 tokenized assets on a scale from wrapper, where a token represents a claim on an offchain asset held by a custodian, to native, where issuance, redemption, and custody all happen fully onchain. The study found 77.6% of assets fell into the category of wrapper. 

The data offers a reality check for the tokenization space, where major financial institutions including BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and JPMorgan have made plays. Despite the encouraging uptake, most tokenization projects are creating blockchain representations of traditional assets such as Treasury bills, but failing to capture the full........

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